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Download a Pdf File of This Issue for Free Issue 66: How the West was Really Won How the West Was Really Won: Did You Know? What a famous painting reveals about America's move west. Did You Know? As North and South clashed in the Civil War, Americans saw hope in one direction: West. This mural study was commissioned during the Civil War for the House Wing of the U. S. Capitol to reflect the country's optimism. (The mural itself, modified slightly from the original, was finished a year later.) The painter, Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze, described his intention: "To represent as near and truthfully as the artist was able the grand peaceful conquest of the great West." A sense of God's providential will—America's "manifest destiny"—infuses the painting. In his notes, Leutze described the emigrants catching their first view of the "'promised land' … having passed the troubles of the plains, 'The valley of darkness' &c." Of the woman near the center of the composition, he wrote that she "has folded her hands thanking for escape from dangers past (religious feeling indicated)." The western "conquest" Leutze noted was not always peaceful, which is hinted in the painting's top border, where Indians flee the descending eagle. An official, though incomplete, Army compilation shows 1,065 engagements between U. S. troops (and occasionally civilians) and Native Americans between 1866 and 1891. The struggling wagon toward the back of the picture is a more accurate depiction of westward travel than the jubilant faces toward the top. The most challenging of early overland routes, the Oregon Trail, covered 2,000 miles of barren plain and steep mountains and required 150 to 180 days to traverse. Traffic along the route didn't really begin until the 1836 party that included missionaries Narcissa Whitman and Eliza Spaulding (the first white women to cross the Rockies) demonstrated the trip was feasible. Just ahead of the wagon train, beneath a shaded cross on the rock, a small group of pioneers buries one of their company. Overland travel was dangerous, as was life in the early West, where medicine and hospitals were in short supply. Missionary Mary Walker, who went with her husband to Oregon in the 1840s, worried about her newborn son: "What is to become of him? His parents one or both may soon be taken away, and then who will care for my child? I hope I can, with some degree of faith and confidence, commit him to the care of his Maker." Next to the wounded boy at the bottom is a woman who "hopes to meet the father of her child, who has preceded them." At least until rail travel and established roads made the trip easier, men outnumbered women in the West by a wide margin—eight to one in Idaho and Montana in 1870. When Wyoming became the first state to grant women's suffrage, in 1869, only about 1,000 white women over the age of 10 lived there. "Wyoming gave women the right to vote," a writer for Harper's Weekly quipped, "in much the same spirit that New York or Pennsylvania might vote to enfranchise angels or Martians." The portraits in the lower margin represent two phases of America's westward expansion. Daniel Boone (1734-1820), at left, was already a legend for his explorations in and around Kentucky. William Clark (1770-1838), at right, had traveled with Meriwether Lewis from 1803 to 1806 to map the land acquired in the Louisiana Purchase. The main part of the lower margin, a panorama of the "Golden Gate," or entrance to San Francisco's harbor, is tied to the painting's manifest destiny theme and its title, found in the banner at the very top. The title comes from the final stanza of a poem by Bishop George Berkeley : Westward the course of Empire takes its way The first four acts already past. A fifth shall close the drama with the day Time's noblest offspring is the last. "The drama of the Pacific Ocean closes our Emigration to the west," Leutze wrote. (The poem also prompted the University of California to name its town Berkeley.) Related Links: See the painting and read more commentary here: www.davidson.edu/academic/english/oldenglish/steiner3.html Copyright © 2000 by the author or Christianity Today International/Christian History magazine. Issue 66: How the West was Really Won How the West Was Really Won: From the Editor - Unexpected Heroes Unexpected Heroes Mark Galli In a story full of cowboys, sheriffs, saloon girls, outlaws, gunfighters, prospectors, and stagecoach drivers, the church was, at best, the place where frightened townspeople gathered to sing hymns and await rescue by the all-too-worldly hero … ," writes Patricia Nelson Limerick in a 1996 essay "Believing in the American West." "If one went in search of the classic heroes in the mythic turf of the Old West, one would not bother to look among the clergy." Limerick's next sentence, though, is the most intriguing: "In the quest for western heroes, there is good reason now to look in unexpected, less explored places." Good reason indeed, and if you look in this issue of Christian History, you will find some of those unexpected heroes. The topic—Christianity in the American West—is as big as the region, and as diverse. There is no one overarching narrative like the Puritan story that dominates early New England. There is no single figure whose presence is felt throughout the region, such as George Whitefield in the eighteenth-century colonies. Sheldon Jackson ("Out Yonder, on the Edge of Things") is one of the largest personalities of the West, and as such deserves the attention we give him. But others could have been singled out as well, like Bishop Daniel Tuttle, "Brother Van" Ordsel ("Local Heroes"), and many others. All in all, local heroes and local stories dominate the West, and unfortunately, we can tell only a few of these stories. Some stories we've consciously left out for lack of space. Roman Catholic missionaries like Franciscan Marcos de Niza, for example, were already evangelizing the West nearly a century before the Pilgrims landed at Jamestown in 1620. But you won't find much information on Catholic efforts in this issue. Be that as it may, what you have in your hand is a pretty fair picture of Protestantism in the trans- Mississippi West from about 1840 to about 1910. Some of the heroes you'll encounter here are nameless; others are flawed. But overall, you'll see a diversity of men and women who brought the gospel to the West at considerable personal sacrifice, and who lived out their faith with immense courage—and thus shaped the region more than western mythmakers have led us to believe. Copyright © 2000 by the author or Christianity Today International/Christian History magazine. Issue 66: How the West was Really Won Preparing a Way in the Wilderness Though history has all but forgotten them, it was Christian preachers and teachers who really tamed the West. Ferenc Morton Szasz In 1890 William D. Bloys, a Presbyterian Army chaplain at Fort Davis, Texas, began a regular outdoor service in a pasture 19 miles from the fort. Officially the "Bloys Camp Meeting," his motley gathering of cowboys and ranchers became known as the "Spiritual Hitchin' Post of West Texas." Bloys never tried to force a man to accept a faith he didn't feel he needed, but many men in that wild country did accept—and cleaned up their lives. One observer remarked, "No boy raised up at Bloys ever ended in the Jeff Davis County Jail." Though such signs of spiritual life appeared all over the western landscape, they are completely absent from most people's visions of the nineteenth-century American frontier. Names like Buffalo Bill, Sitting Bull, Annie Oakley, Calamity Jane, Billy the Kid, and Wyatt Earp are almost synonymous with the West, while names like William D. Bloys, Daniel S. Tuttle, Charles Sheldon, Sheldon Jackson, and Brother Van Orsdel ring few bells. Yet if one looks at actual accomplishments, the situation might well be reversed. Most western communities owe far more to these unheralded clerics than they do to the high-profile outlaws or icons. From about 1840 to the end of the century, these largely anonymous ministers shaped the contours of western life in three major ways. They formed the first churches and Sunday schools, which promoted social stability while reining in local violence; they developed a distinctly western style of Christianity that emphasized a non-denominational message of salvation and personal ethics; and they helped lay the institutional foundations—orphanages, hospitals, and schools—for scores of western communities. Into the fray The American West of the Civil War era was full of violence. In 1859, for example, an observer noted that the only need El Paso, Texas, had for a minister was to bury the dead. Presbyterian minister Alexander T. Rankin described Denver of 1860 as a town of no laws, jails, or courts, and thus a land with "no restraint on human passion." The bodies of six recently hanged horse thieves greeted Episcopal rector John Cornell when he first stepped off the train in Laramie, Wyoming, in 1866. Even in the 1880s, Baptist James Spencer noted that he could postmark his letters from Butte, Montana, as sent "from Hell." The clergy naturally hoped that by organizing fledgling churches they could stem this tide. Thus their initial response was to scour their area for enough people to found a "First" (Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, etc.) church. The mobility of both pastors and parishioners, however, meant that these "First" churches remained small for years.
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